The problems of Papuan students in Java Island

As a university student who comes from Papua to study in Java Island, Javanese people require him/her to concord with the nature or climate, culture or behavior and language use in Java Island. Talking about the language use in Java Island, however, those two languages are extremely different. In Wikipedia, it is called as divergence, i.e. a situation where an individual places strong emphasis on a communicative act that is different than the one to whom they are speaking. According to Thanasoulas, overdoing divergence may offend others because they tend to do dis-accommodation meaning the shift of registers by certain people in repeating something uttered by their interlocutors.

According to Holmes (2001), people in multilingual countries may accommodate to others by selecting the code that is most comfortable for their addressees. Thanasoulas also believes that people accommodate to others by adjusting their communicational behavior to the basic roles that participants are assigned in a given context. Boylan explains that accommodation is the term normally used when we adjust our way of interacting with people of different cultures in order to facilitate communication. According to Boylan, an individual is said to accommodate if she or he meets her or his interlocutors on their cultural backgrounds by adopting their phonological system and using their habitual turn-taking procedures.

In Wikipedia, speech accommodation also called convergence, i.e. the concept that an individual changes their speech pattern in various interactions. This concept not only speech patterns but behaviors as well. It stated that individual in an interaction might converge for the purpose of demonstrating that they can interact to other person. The free encyclopedia explains convergence is a psychological reaction that individuals have to be liked by others. Some findings demonstrated that elder people tend to be less accommodating than the young people.

In order to accommodate interlocutors, Thanasoulas said that there is a tendency for people to become more alike in terms of linguistic, non-verbal features, including pronunciation, utterance length, pauses, speech rates, vocal intensities, as well as facial expressions and the "intimacy of their self-disclosures". On the other hands, Wikipedia believed that accommodation is not always change in every aspect of a person's speech or behavior in different interaction. It's called as maintenance meaning a phenomenon that occurs when an individual does not change particular communication acts or behaviors. In Thanasoulas' opinion, maintenance can cause many speakers of regional dialects may become bi-dialectal which is shifting their speech according to the situations they are in.

In conclusion, a Papuan students tries to accommodate interlocutors in order to keep survive in language differences for people in certain place she stayed. This Papuans student, however, not change all the aspects of speech or behavior to interact since she maintenance her own dialect. She may become bi-dialectal according to the situation she is in.